Frugalio: Week 1 /Site #1

Just as in Sales I always advise people to go for the easy win first, I decided for the first week I would go with a very simple idea. I just wanted an end product by the end of the first week and very little more.

The idea: Fitting perhaps, that I went with Frugalio — a text-based user-submitted Tips page for people trying to save money, complete with a cheesy headline: ‘Frugal tips for a richer life’. People are able to submit money-saving tips and read tips submitted by others.

*Note: I am not building responsive sites yet, so if you’re reading this on anything smaller than a desktop/laptop, it’ll probably look awful.

What it does (key features):

Simple submit page: Click button in top corner (submit a tip) takes user through to a page to submit their text-based tip

Search box: Easy to search answers by tip title for users

Automatic showing of submission on homepage: Answers appear on homepage once submitted

Tools used: Bubble.is

What I learned this week:

The Group concept on Bubble is pretty powerful — it made it easy to build logical workflows

Bubble is not by default very responsive — I did have a quick go at making it responsive but I’ll save that for a future site(I never planned for it to be responsive before I began)

It feels great to have a finished project already!

If I had more time:

I would improve the search — currently it only searches answers by Title, whereas I’d like it to search the whole answer

Add upvote capabilities — Rather than the user have to read each one, it would be good to display the most popular tips (presumably the most useful) at the top

I would add user-login — not required here, but it would be good to see who has submitted answers and give the contributor more reason to submit great tips, especially if upvote capabilities were there too

Time spent on this site: 6+ hours, mainly trying to get the data working and building the pages that I ended up deleting!

As always, photos of the site at various stages including the quick sketch plan by me are below.

Please leave and answer on the page and tell me what you think. Do you like it? What would you do differently?